The MarTech Stack You Need To Execute ABM In 2023

Account-based marketing (ABM) has become a critical strategy for B2B marketers as it allows companies to reduce customer acquisition costs, streamline targeting and generate more business within targeted key accounts. However, companies have to invest in a wide range of software tools to execute ABM Tech at scale. Selecting the right kind of technology needed to implement and measure personalized ABM is an expensive proposition. It requires marketers to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of different business challenges and goals while building the MarTech stack.

If you are looking to execute ABM technology in 2020 and want to understand the value of different tools at different stages, we suggest taking a look at the ABM MarTech stack recommendations listed below. 

Target Account Selection

The first step of implementing the ABM strategy is identifying the right target accounts and prioritizing the key accounts by delivering personalized content. This exercise helps to extract relevant information about the decision-makers at all levels spread across the entire B2B sales cycle. 

As the success of ABM depends heavily on connecting with the right people at targeted accounts, account selection serves as the foundation. By fine-tuning the account selection process for ABM Tech, marketers can drive more qualified leads and increase conversion rates. With the help of tools and technology, marketers can gain insight into demographic, firmographics, technographic and sociographic data of their potential B2B buyers. 

The recommended tech stack options for account selection include:

• Lattice that integrates first party and third party data to design a 360-degree view of customers and prospects. The company identifies the key target accounts with the most potential by segmenting customers using AI and data
• 6Sense is another strong performer in the account and contact selection category, which can uncover buying intent across every channel, be it from first-party campaigns, early-stage interest on third party websites or anonymous buyers across the internet
• Everstring uses predictive marketing to optimize target account selection and follows a tiered approach by building account personas

Discovering Contacts 

After identifying key accounts, marketers would need database tools to gather relevant contacts. These tools provide the names and contact information of key decision-makers at those accounts. 

Our recommendations to discover contacts include the following tools:

• ZoomInfo is a trusted B2B contact database tool to get a list of potential contacts that arrive on your website. It helps to fill the gaps in the marketing database by using AI to analyze your searches and suggest similar contacts and accounts
• Datanyze is another tool that provides insights on contacts at target accounts, be it their place on the decision-making hierarchy, engagement history, personal goals or experience

Gathering Insights

As the B2B buying process is long and complex in this digital age, a considerable part of the buyer’s journey is not visible to marketers. Intent data fits effortlessly into ABM strategies and enables marketers to identify these invisible prospects and capture digital searches. It scrutinizes information captured from various sources such as social media interactions, blogs, white paper downloads, attending a webinar, ad clicks and other such touch-points.

Therefore, tools to get account-based intent data are on every marketer’s list after selecting accounts and discovering contact details.

• On the MarTech stack side, Dun & Bradstreet (D & B) works well when it comes to providing data about leads, company business information and contact details
• D & B-acquired Avention is a company favoured by marketers because of its OneSource line of data products. Avention’s intuitive and interactive interface allows data to become real-time triggers and helps marketers to leverage real-time and actionable data insights. As it can be integrated with CRM and other marketing automation systems, it is one of the most sophisticated intent data tools available to ABM marketers
• BAO is another recommended option as it offers account insights that uncover a prospect company’s pain points, trigger events, competitive landscape, technology environment and purchase intent

Delivering Content

While intent data insights would help to envision the right messaging for each target account, ABM needs tools to create account-specific content and messaging that translates the insights into actions. This is a crucial step in the execution of ABM Tech as the alignment between the sales and marketing team is put to test at this stage. 

The ABM Tech team needs tools that will help them to create engaging, productive, relevant and disruptive content to transform leads into customers. 

• Seismic’s Marketing Enablement solution does an excellent job of leveraging content automation and supporting the sales team. It allows the sales and marketing team to stay connected by the same AI-powered platform. It also wins in the user-friendliness department as the sales team can also pull out information and design personalized content without summoning the marketing team
• If you are looking for a platform that would help representatives quickly find, curate, customize and share content with the help of predictive search, then Docurated is a tool worth exploring
• With Google urging marketers to focus on creating good content by releasing the BERT update, IDG and Uberflip are two options that can be considered for producing personalized, unique and engaging content

Managing Interactions 

As we approach the busiest and the most diverse stage of ABM strategy armed with meaningful content, the value of tools required to manage interaction channels, run targeted campaigns and interact with the engaged accounts increases manifold.

Based on your company needs, you would need an assortment of tools to manage interactions through ads, web, direct mail, email, calling and events. 

• Engagio is the number one ABM Tech platform globally. It helps to search, engage, and convert the most engaged accounts by integrating the best of lead-based and account-based marketing strategies
• When it comes to serving up targeted IP-based ads to engage key accounts, Terminus and Demandbase are great additions to the MarTech ABM stack
• Terminus is also a great platform for running targeted campaigns across display advertising, Linkedin, direct mail, and email advertising
• PFL’s tactile marketing automation blends the best of direct mailing with digital marketing, which helps to increase sales outreach and response rates

Supporting Orchestration And Reviewing Performance

After orchestration and engagement, comes measurement and reporting. For that, marketers need foundational tools like CRM and marketing automation software. These foundational tools are required for lead nurturing and scoring. They also help to create a seamless website experience, track activity at targeted accounts and measure the performance of demand generation and lead generation effort. CRM should also be in place to get a full view of how your funnel is moving.

Our recommended Martech stack to gain a 360-degree view of your customers combines the strength of CRM systems and marketing automation tools. It includes:

• Engagio is an effective tool for keeping track of your project performance. If you are looking for a tool that would allow you to track the performance of your inbound marketing strategy for different accounts on a single dashboard, then our team of experts recommends Engagio
• From the marketing perspective, Marketo helps to measure account engagement and identify account-specific experiences that are churning out the highest ROI. 
• Hubspot, on the other hand, has similar capabilities as Marketo in terms of measuring and reporting the performance of ABM. But the former is more suited for large organizations, whereas the latter is an ideal fit for small and mid-sized companies. However, Hubspot also acts as a valuable CRM tool, besides being an effective marketing automation tool
• For companies with complex integration requirements, Salesforce would be a better CRM software option

ABM Stack Building Basics

As ABM strategies vary from account to account, the MarTech stack also looks different for each company. Modern marketing is collaborative, cooperative and experiential. Therefore, look for tools that are flexible to plug, play and integrate with other tools to improve your ABM workflow. If you are in the middle of assessing options, are overwhelmed with the available choices and need additional information beyond what the software companies are providing you, then consider getting in touch with our team of experts to get your questions answered.